Living through history
For better and for worse
It’s a warm November day, and I’ve just left a polling place in Dallas with the girlfriend who told me a couple weeks ago she thought I might be the one, and who will dump me three weeks later. She takes me back to the airport so I can fly back home to where I live, in Chicago, where my best friend will be celebrating his birthday that evening. I fly Southwest from Love Field to Midway, fittingly located on Chicago’s southwest side. I ride the Orange Line, which will take me downtown before I transfer to the Red Line that will usher me up to our modest apartment in Edgewater. As we get closer to downtown, the sun setting over the western horizon, more and more young people board the train, signs in hand, an anticipatory buzz crackling like static around the car.
I’d paid enough attention to the right news sources to be optimistic heading into that evening. The thought of the most absurd, brash, starkly unfit person on a presidential ticket in my lifetime — not to mention someone my family had personal beef with — actually winning was unnerving. Riding the train that evening, though, it felt impossible. It felt like history was about to be made. I considered joining them, getting off, travel bag in hand, just walking over to Grant Park and figuring it out when I got there. I’ve thought many times since about the butterfly effects of what might have changed if I had.
Instead, I went home and watched the results pour in with a dozen friends in our apartment. When they called Pennsylvania, I knew that Barack Obama had become America’s first Black president (and that Sarah Palin would be nowhere near the White House). I cried, I hugged those in the room, and we poured into the Chicago night to celebrate.
It’s a bleary November evening and I’m running straight from work in D.C. to the airport to catch a flight with my boss for a conference. I’m working in the major leagues again, like I did in Chicago, but this time with a real, full-time, big boy job. It’s an MLB conference, in the offseason following the first ascendant year of our team, which ended in heart wrenching defeat. That loss, coupled with my hometown Oakland A’s getting knocked out less than 24 hours earlier, feels like the lowest point in my own personal recent memory.
My boss and I land at Midway, old Midway again, and take the train up into downtown Chicago. We sit in a mediocre restaurant in River North and watch the results come in. There’s much less fanfare in our immediate field of vision this time around, but for the second straight election, I’ve flown into Chicago on the day that Obama has won the presidency.
It’s a cold, overcast January morning. There’s an unsettling surrealness in the air, like something is dying, but nobody knows quite how to eulogize it just yet. After being processed through several layers of security, I’m standing on the asphalt in the shadow of The People’s House, catching up with some old baseball colleagues and trying to do my job. I spot a prominent friend and consultant of the leader of the free world before anyone else does and I get two minutes of his time, to ask him what it means for the Chicago Cubs to be celebrating their World Series win at the White House on one of the final days of Obama’s presidency.
“It’s historic in many ways,” David Axelrod tells me, comparing the Cubs’ improbable win with Obama’s own in 2008, back when we all lived in Chicago. “There’s so much poetry to it.”
I’m not old enough to have lived through the Kennedy administration, but I can only describe the feeling as The Last Day of Camelot. I snap what will turn out to be probably the best photo I’ve ever taken, one which I’ll still revisit from time to time. It’s a snapshot of something that feels not just lost, but almost impossible to ever have been.
It’s a cold, overcast January morning. I’d paid enough attention to the right news sources to be dreading what that day might bring, to warn friends to stay out of downtown. I’m sitting on my couch, two miles up the hill from the Hill, watching as a crowd amasses, then swarms the Capitol Building to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. I scream at the TV “where is the national guard?” a question I will later learn the answer to. An entire insurrection plays out live on national TV, just down the road.
I reassure my friends and family that, as we learned during the summer, unrest tends not to travel uphill, that what happens down there doesn’t impact us any more than it impacts them. Which is to say, not terribly much in that moment, yet so much more than we could have envisioned down the road.
It’s a warm November day, and I’ve just started walking with my wife along the reservoir by our house, en route to pick up our daughter from daycare. As we hit the fence line along the water we can hear echoes from a loudspeaker, hanging from a temporary installment a few hundred feet away. A woman’s voice faintly, unintelligibly, warbles over the expanse, interspersed with occasional cheers from a crowd. A couple passes us with a phone out, watching the livestream of the same event, happening just out of sight, just over our shoulders now as we walk away from Howard University.
By the time we pick up our daughter and walk home, police have started to shut down intersections on our path home. Just after we cross onto the last block to turn up our street, the motorcade exits the secure perimeter. A few people stand on the sidewalk, silent, with their phones recording. The convoy of black vehicles passes silently, like a funeral procession.